Omar Nelson Bradley
General of the Army Omar Nelson Bradley (February 12, 1893 – April 8, 1981), nicknamed Brad, was a highly distinguished senior officer of the United States Army who saw distinguished service in North Africa and Western Europe during World War II, and later became General of the Army. From the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944 through to the end of the war in Europe, Bradley had command of all U.S. ground forces invading Germany from the west; he ultimately commanded forty-three divisions and 1.3 million men, the largest body of American soldiers ever to serve under a single U.S. field commander. After the war, Bradley headed the Veterans Administration and became Army Chief of Staff. In 1949, Bradley was appointed the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the following year oversaw the policy-making for the Korean War, before retiring from active service in 1953.
Bradley was the last of only nine people to hold a five-star rank in the United States Armed Forces.
Bradley, the son of schoolteacher John Smith Bradley (1868–1908) and Mary Elizabeth Hubbard (1875–1931), was born into poverty in rural Randolph County, near Clark, Missouri. Bradley was named after Omar D. Gray, a local newspaper editor admired by his father, and a local doctor called Nelson. He was of British ancestry, his ancestors having emigrated from Great Britain to Kentucky in the mid-1700s. He attended country schools where his father taught. When Omar was 15 his father, with whom he credited passing on to him a love of books, baseball and shooting, died. His mother moved to Moberly, Missouri and remarried. Bradley graduated from Moberly High School in 1910, an outstanding student and captain of both the baseball and football teams.
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